By Sean Martin
Today’s institutions face an unprecedented cybersecurity landscape, marked by sophisticated threats, including the rapid rise of AI-driven attacks. These evolving risks require organizations to take a proactive, forward-looking approach to cybersecurity that integrates strong security controls.
Navigating the Risks of Remote Work
Most organizations now recognize the importance of enabling remote work, whether to offer greater workforce flexibility or to ensure business continuity during disruptions or disasters. While remote work delivers clear operational benefits, it also introduces a new set of cybersecurity challenges.
Without a well-defined strategy or proper controls for secure remote access, employees will often find their own ways to connect—and those methods may not be secure. Remote work also complicates how data is stored, accessed and protected.
With remote connectivity, data is far more dispersed than it once was. Today, corporate data is commonly stored on laptops, mobile devices and cloud platforms to support remote access. In some situations, sensitive information may even reside on employees’ personal devices.
Given this expanded attack surface, it’s critical to ensure the right controls are in place. Because organizational boundaries now extend beyond the four walls of a physical building, institutions must clearly understand:
Where their data resides
How that data moves across systems
What controls are in place to protect it
Endpoint vulnerabilities represent another significant concern in remote work environments. For example, if an employee uses a web-sharing application from home to access the corporate network and that endpoint contains vulnerabilities, it can introduce substantial risk to the organization.
Additional Considerations: Data Loss Prevention, EDR and Monitoring
Visibility into user activity is essential. Organizations must understand how and when users connect to systems so they can identify and respond to suspicious behavior. Monitoring for unusual login activity, such as repeated failed attempts or access from unexpected geographic locations, allows teams to act quickly when incidents occur.
Institutions should also routinely monitor for missing patches, outdated antivirus software and improperly configured endpoint protection tools. Maintaining awareness of these gaps is critical to preventing exploitation.
Equally important is understanding where data resides and where it is being transmitted. Implementing controls to prevent unauthorized access or data exfiltration is essential. Sensitive corporate data, for example, should never leave the network without authorization. To support this, organizations must establish programs that classify, identify and protect critical information.
Exploring the New Frontier: AI in Banking
One of the most common uses of AI is identifying information within network environments, such as documents, files or project-related data. To do this, AI systems scan internal networks. Without proper segmentation or controls, these tools may access confidential or sensitive information, including financial data or contractual records.
At the same time, AI has significantly increased both the speed and sophistication of cyberattacks. Hackers now use AI to generate malicious code, identify vulnerabilities and exploit them more efficiently. AI also enables attackers to chain multiple vulnerabilities together. When vendors disclose several weaknesses in their systems, attackers can leverage AI to exploit them rapidly and at scale.
Although many institutions are still defining their AI strategies, others have already embedded AI into daily operations. This adoption can unintentionally surface previously unidentified sensitive data.
To mitigate these risks, organizations can deploy data loss prevention (DLP) systems that continuously scan networks to identify, analyze and label sensitive information, restricting unauthorized access. Many institutions are also implementing continuous vulnerability assessments that perform regular scans and alert IT teams to potential risks in real time.
Employee education is another critical safeguard. Users should understand what AI is, how it can support their work and what security controls the organization has in place. Educating staff on the potential risks of AI—both personal and institutional—empowers them to make informed decisions in their daily activities.
Maintaining Cybersecurity in the Cloud
Cloud migration has become nearly universal across the industry. Alongside the expansion of remote work, cloud adoption accelerated dramatically over the past four years, driven in part by the pandemic.
Cloud platforms offer significant advantages, including scalable resources and improved support for distributed workforces. However, they also introduce unique cybersecurity risks.
One of the most common threats in cloud environments is misconfiguration, highlighting the need for a thorough understanding of how cloud systems operate. As data increasingly resides in the cloud and is accessed from remote endpoints and mobile devices, the overall attack surface continues to expand.
Institutions must identify where their data lives and ensure appropriate security controls are applied at every point of access. Even simple configuration errors can result in major breaches, making cloud posture assessment tools a critical component of an extended vulnerability management program.
Regular vulnerability scanning across cloud applications and infrastructure is essential to maintaining a strong security posture.
Building a Comprehensive Security Strategy
Developing a comprehensive security strategy begins with recognizing the need for an integrated approach that addresses the interconnected risks of remote work, cloud adoption and AI. Organizations must also accept that modern networks are effectively borderless. With users working remotely, data stored in the cloud and information spread across endpoints and mobile devices, a holistic perspective is required.
AI considerations should be fully integrated into cybersecurity frameworks, particularly as AI can amplify risks tied to vendor-disclosed vulnerabilities. These risks must be mitigated quickly through effective scanning and timely vulnerability remediation.
Regulatory compliance remains another critical factor. While evolving regulations can be challenging, proactively addressing compliance requirements strengthens security and reduces overall technology risk.
Mitigating Risk in an Evolving Cybersecurity Landscape
The most damaging breaches often stem from overlooked vulnerabilities, such as phishing attacks or ransomware that spreads internally after exploiting system weaknesses. Attackers continuously search for these entry points, using increasingly advanced techniques to gain access.
To defend against these threats, institutions should implement layered security controls alongside robust user security training. Organizations that cultivate a strong security-aware culture among employees are consistently the most resilient in an ever-changing cybersecurity environment.
About the Author
Sean Martin is director of product strategy, CSI Business Solutions Group for Managed Services. Sean has worked to establish cybersecurity programs for financial institutions for over 15 years. Previously, Sean has served as Network and Security Operations Manager, Product Manager, and various engineering roles since 2001.